Approach for the Conceptual Design Validation of Production Systems using Automated Simulation-Model Generation

Increasing global competition forces companies to constantly reduce the time-to-market of their products. This involves not only the reduction of the product development time itself, but also the reduction of production system development until the desired production output level has been achieved. Since the development of product and production system highly determine each other, they have to be developed in a close interplay. According to Systems Engineering principles all the involved engineering disciplines must be included in an integrated development process based on a common system model to achieve the required systems thinking. Each engineering discipline performs its individual development task in accordance with the overall requirements and dependencies that are defined within the system model. However in early design phases there is always a gap between the general system model and the discipline-specific development tools since the system characteristics are not yet entirely defined and subject to change. In our contribution we present and validate an approach to automatically generate discrete-event material flow simulation models from a general system model of the production system already in the conceptual design phase. The approach enables a continuous validation of the overall system design and therefore significantly reduces the development time and costs. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B. V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Georgia Institute of Technology.